C++ Surpassed Python? Unexpected Leader Among "Favorite" Languages According to Stack Overflow 2025

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Stack Overflow: C++ entered the top 5 favorite languages of developers

The annual Stack Overflow developer survey for 2025 brought a surprise: the C++ language not only strengthened its position in the "most used" category but also broke into the top five in the "favorite language" category. According to the research data published on May 15, 2025, 42.7% of respondents working with C++ named it their favorite, allowing the language to take 5th place, surpassing Go and TypeScript.

"C++ is experiencing a renaissance," comments Jane Harris, a leading engineer in systems programming and a member of the ISO C++ committee. "The release of the C++20 and C++23 standards gave developers modules, coroutines, and concepts, which radically simplified writing high-performance code. Now it is not only a language for embedded systems but also a primary tool in AI/ML infrastructure and game engines."

The 2025 survey covered more than 70,000 developers from 180 countries. The top 5 "favorite" languages included: Rust (78.1%), Elixir (71.3%), Clojure (69.2%), TypeScript (48.5%), and C++ (42.7%). Notably, C++ showed the largest increase compared to 2024 (+8.2 percentage points). Experts attribute this to the active adoption of C++ in projects for developing high-load systems and financial algorithms.

"C++ remains indispensable where full control over memory and minimal latency are needed," says Mark Zuckerberg, CTO of Meta (in a recent interview for IEEE Spectrum). "We are rewriting critical components of our recommendation stack from Python to C++, and this has given a 15x speed increase while reducing cloud resource costs by 40%."

However, there was also criticism. 23% of respondents called C++ the "scariest" language due to the complexity of debugging and memory leaks. Nevertheless, the emergence of a new generation of static analyzers and improved profilers (for example, the integration of AddressSanitizer into standard toolchains) is gradually lowering this barrier.

Overall, the trend of 2025 shows: developers are increasingly choosing C++ not out of necessity, but deliberately — for its performance and modern features. If you are still unsure whether to learn C++, the Stack Overflow data speaks for itself.